Playwright who ploughs her own furrow

Almost uniquely among today's writers, late starter Nell Leyshon cares about country life. She talks to Charles Spencer

In my job, one of the greatest thrills is discovering a new writer of fresh and manifest talent, so I am unlikely to forget my first encounter with the work of Nell Leyshon. It was 2001, the year of the foot and mouth crisis, and I received a press release about a play called The Farm that was doing a tour of the West Country.

It was the time of the great countryside marches and the feeling was growing that the Labour government didn't give a stuff about the troubles of rural England. I'd never heard of the Strode Theatre Company or most of the venues The Farm was playing, and when I turned up at a dilapidated converted cinema in Minehead my expectations were low.

But in her account of the problems facing a small Somerset farm, and the pressures on the family trying to keep it going, it was clear that Leyshon was a writer of skill and passion, ploughing a highly original furrow in a new writing landscape entirely dominated by urban drama.

The play transferred to the Southwark Playhouse, but it wasn't until 2005 that Leyshon's next play, Comfort Me With Apples, opened at the Hampstead Theatre, where she was Pearson playwright in residence. Once again, this concentrated on the plight of a farm, but naturalism had given way to far richer and more poetic writing, creating an extraordinary drama of long suppressed family secrets, potent folk myths and an air of autumnal melancholy and decay at a dying cider farm. The stage was covered with apples, whose aroma permeated the whole auditorium.

This time Leyshon was widely and positively reviewed and the play deservedly won her the Evening Standard's Charles Wintour award for most promising playwright, with a £30,000 cash prize.

In the normal scheme of things, promising playwrights are young. Leyshon, in contrast, is in her mid-forties, and her transformation into a prolific, award-writing writer is an inspiring tale of grit and fortitude. She is the daughter of bohemian parents, who lived in Glastonbury and ran a hippie shop. "My parents really believed children didn't need rules," she says. "They needed bedtimes and there were meals, great food, but you were definitely an individual."

When she was 12 they moved a few miles to Compton Dundon, a farming village on the edge of the Somerset levels, and young Nell became fascinated by the other families living nearby, often moving in with them for days on end to experience their lives. It is from these families that her work has drawn much of its inspiration.

"Just after the war, there were 21 farms in the village. When I was living there as a child there were 14. Now there are one and a half, and it has become a dormitory village. It seems shocking that no one noticed. Everyone noticed the shipyards going, everyone noticed the coal mines going. Nobody noticed what happened to farming."

It was a long time before Leyshon discovered her vocation and her subject. As a young woman, she worked on TV commercials in London, then decamped to Spain with her boyfriend Dominic, who remains her partner to this day. They came back "with no money, no jobs and me pregnant" and started facing up to real life. "I realised my brain was very unstructured and I wanted to educate myself. So I went and did an English degree at Southampton University."

It wasn't until after the birth of her second son 12 years ago that Leyshon started to write seriously. "I just thought, right, I'm going to write a novel. So I literally sat my six-month baby on my lap and wrote one. I got to the end of it, and thought, it's not good enough. So I wrote another one. And that was terrible. And then I did another one. And that wasn't good enough either." So with reckless pluck, she burnt them in her vegetable patch. "Dom kept asking me if this was what I wanted to do, and I said yes, it felt so good to get rid of it all."

The bonfire seemed to do the trick. Her next novel, Black Dirt, was published by Picador, and longlisted for the Orange Prize. And it was while she was temporarily blocked with that that she wrote The Farm. There have also been plays for Radio 4, and this year sees a positive flood of activity.

A second novel is about to go to the publishers and later this month Hampstead revives Comfort Me with Apples before touring it to mostly rural theatres. She has also adapted Daphne du Maurier's scary Don't Look Now, which opens at the Sheffield Lyceum next month before transferring to the Lyric Hammersmith, while in June Hampstead premières Glass Eels, the second of an intended quartet of Somerset plays, each set in a different season.

All this work will be directed by Lucy Bailey, best known for her sexually-charged productions of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Baby Doll and the spectacularly gory Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare's Globe last summer.

It was only when they met to discuss Comfort Me with Apples, however, that the pair realised they had been in the same form at junior school in Somerset. They now seem to have become soul sisters with great artistic empathy and trust.

On the stage, Leyshon's plays are gripping but grim. In person she's a vivacious, still slightly bohemian character with a strong sense of humour, and the confidence that comes from having belatedly discovered her true calling.

"You soon learn that writers' personalities and what they actually write aren't necessarily connected," she says. "I want to touch my audience, I want to move them, I don't want them to leave the theatre feeling cold. I've got a lot to say and I feel I've been silenced for a long time. So I write all day. I've found my inner workaholic and I find it very hard to stop at weekends."

As she describes putting the finishing touches to her new novel, and polishing her plays, I have rarely seen a happier or more fulfilled woman. She may have started late as a writer but Leyshon is clearly in it for the long haul.

'Comfort Me with Apples' is at Hampstead Theatre, London NW3 (020 7722 9301), from Jan 18-27, then touring until March 31. 'Don't Look Now' is at Sheffield Lyceum (0114 249 6000) from Feb 22-March 10, then the Lyric Hammersmith.